Marching on Together - Late Tackle Magazine (September 2020)
The first Leeds United match I went to was against Chelsea at the start of the 1994/95 season. Leeds raced into a 2–0 lead through Phil Masinga and a spectacular bicycle kick from Noel Whelan and, sat with my mum and brother in the South Stand, I was having the time of my 7-year-old life. Unfortunately, as would go on to be something of a theme over the subsequent 25 years, the good times didn’t last long. Leeds imploded and a John Spencer-inspired Chelsea fought back to win 3–2 leaving me close to tears as we trudged back to my mum’s car. On the way home, my mum tried to console us but, seemingly thinking she was with her friends rather than her primary school-aged sons, made several references to how handsome she thought John Spencer was. We were angered by such treachery so she attempted to appease us by saying Gordon Strachan had also caught her eye. Her penchant for short Scottish men did not bode well for my dad who is neither of these things.
While Leeds had a decent season in 1994/95, my own luck was wretched, and we went to seven winless matches before a last-gasp Carlton Palmer rocket against Aston Villa at the end of the season finally provided me with my first winning feeling. Twenty years later, I met Carlton Palmer at a legends tournament in Hong Kong (I was a spectator, not a legend). A few beers deep, I thought Carlton would be keen to hear how happy his goal had made me all those years ago but he would have been harder pressed to have given less of a fuck, and swiftly slinked off to the bar where Chris Waddle was buying a pitcher of lager.
Despite my poor start to life as Leeds fan, I was hooked and, even during George Graham’s anti-football season where we drew 0–0 every week, going to Elland Road with my mum and brother had become the thing I looked forward to most in life. Perhaps as a result of my mother’s wandering eye, my dad had little interest in football and only ever took us to one match, the Youth Cup final in 1997, where a Leeds team including Paul Robinson, Jonathon Woodgate, Harry Kewell and Alan Smith overcame Crystal Palace. My primary school had handed out free tickets for the match and my dad somehow, I don’t think out of choice, ended up as a parental supervisor. You’d think this might have been an easy gig but, at half-time, he had to break up a fistfight between two of my classmates after one of them, allegedly deliberately, sprayed their Panda Pop on the other’s white Kappa tracksuit. Incidentally, the Panda Pop sprayer would go on to become a prolific burglar, a career which peaked with a mug-shot appearance on Crimewatch.
My favourite players of the era were Lucas Radebe, Gary Kelly, Gary Speed and, of course, Toby Yeboah whose goals my brother and I tried, with zero success, to replicate in our back garden. I was incredibly excited when we signed Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink and promptly headed to the club shop in town to get Jimmy ‘9 on the back of my shirt. If memory serves me correct, he wore this on his goal scoring debut against Arsenal but shortly afterwards the Premier League vetoed it as it wasn’t his real name so my shirt was instantly out-of-date. I was fuming, although not as much as my mate who, a couple of years later, got Hasselbaink ‘9, pricey at 75p a letter, on his shirt the day before he left for Atletico Madrid. In my mate’s defence, our best source of transfer gossip at the time was the TeamTalk hotline which had a per-minute rate to rival Babestation.
The O’Leary era was, of course, magnificent and I don’t think I realized just how lucky I was to be a Leeds fan at the time. His exciting young team were a joy to watch and, like many Leeds fans of my age, the Champions League run provides me with some of my fondest football memories. All Leeds fans remember exactly where they were and who they were with for Dida’s spill, Smith’s dink and Matteo’s header, don’t they? (I was in my living room for the entire thing but I’ve definitely lied about this since.)
I’ve never had much understanding of the financial side of things (my wife would attest to this), and other than Peter Ridsdale’s tropical fish and Seth Johnson’s wage negotiations I had little grasp as to why we suddenly had to sell our best players and replace them with Paul Okon, Cyrille Chapuis and Lamine Sakho. As an avid Championship Manager player, which likely had a lot to do with my near-permanent girlfriendless state throughout my teens, I’d hoped the signing of legend-of-the-game Roque Junior meant everything was going to be fine but sadly this one, like so many others, didn’t quite work out and relegation in 2004 was just devastating.
Leeds United’s downfall coincided with my late-teens and early twenties, a time when I was prone to my own self-destruction at weekends, which was convenient as being in various states of lucidity was the only thing that made watching us bearable much of the time. After so many matches — the 4–0 home loss against Sheffield United springs to mind — I would get home and wonder whether this was really the best way to be spending my free time and money. Was supporting Leeds making my life better in any way?
I was at university in Lancaster by the time Ipswich relegated us to League One and my girlfriend Louise (I’d stopped playing Championship Manager by now) wiped away my drunken tears while probably considering why she’d ever agreed to go out with me. Louise feigned a slight interest in football in the early days of our relationship but appeared less than thrilled when I surprised her with a pair of tickets in the Kop for a Johnstone’s Paint Trophy clash against Hartlepool. Andy Robinson scored a last-minute winner causing (arguably over the top given the competition) delirium in the stands but Louise, not sharing the general good mood, scowled and turned around to the guys behind us.
“Will you stop fucking banging into me!”
Louise’s accent couldn’t be more Southern and her tirade was met with exactly the length of shrift you would expect. I gave the guys an apologetic smile so she reprimanded me for not taking her side and we sat in stony silence in the car on the way home. She has not been back to Elland Road since.
The League One days had their moments. The Leeds-against-the-world mentality of the -15 points season when we won seven on the bounce and everyone begrudgingly accepted they didn’t mind Dennis Wise saw the best atmosphere at Elland Road in years. I should add, I never felt the same about Ken Bates. Surely, the least he could have done, was pay for a scoreboard? Amongst the good fun, however, we had some desperate away days including being with the home fans at Victoria Park when Hartlepool scored a last-minute equalizer so, to avoid a punch, we had to reciprocate hugs from men lacking teeth, or a Sheffield Wednesday fixture when we got lost on the way from Leeds to Hillsborough and missed the match entirely. However, those magical Jermaine Beckford goals against Man United (I had £2.50 on Beckford 1–0 as a cherry on top) and Bristol Rovers made it all just about worthwhile. I think.
For most of the recent Groundhog seasons in the Championship, Louise and I were living in Hong Kong. While Louise was out drinking cocktails in swanky rooftop bars with friends from exotic countries, I spent my weekends watching Leeds games on a stalling internet stream in a British pub while middle-aged guys from Armley said things like.
“What the fuck is Darren O’Dea playing at?!”
Despite the underwhelming football we were playing, being with fellow Leeds supporters far from home was excellent and I met some great guys, some of whom would go on to form an official branch of the Leeds United’s supporters’ club over there which has gone from strength to strength.
An early incarnation of the Hong Kong Whites, circa 2012.
By the time Louise and I returned to Leeds, the Cellino madness was well underway. There were new false dawns — I genuinely thought Uwe Rösler was the man to get us up, Jordan Botaka would become a world-beater and my bet on Marcus Antonsson to be Championship top scorer represented smart money — but we remained aggressively stuck in the division. For all that’s been said since about Garry Monk, I enjoyed his season in charge and I can’t hate a guy that brought Pablo Hernandez to Leeds.
When Marcelo Bielsa was appointed, I recognized the name but honestly didn’t know too much about him. A mate of mine, more knowledgeable than me, said.
“This will either be a complete disaster or the best thing that has ever happened to our club.”
I was underwhelmed when I saw the starting line-up Bielsa’s first game against Stoke last season as it was much the same as Paul Heckingbottom’s team. It sounds odd putting those names in the same sentence, doesn’t it? From the second the match kicked off, though, it was clear that something special was happening. The players were unrecognizable and the intensity and tempo we were playing at, with swarm after swarm of attack against a team fancied to bounce straight back up, was staggering. Cooper, Phillips and Roofe looked like different players entirely and I thought we’d sold Klich over the summer.
A special day: a win against Middlesborough.
I’ve been fortunate to get to plenty of games over these past two years. I am now the classic man-in-his-thirties West Stand-type (drive to the ground, one pint at half-time, get home for the kids’ bedtime) but these have undoubtedly been the most exciting and enjoyable two seasons of my life. When Leeds are on it, which is considerably more often than not, it doesn’t seem to matter who we’re playing and so many opposition teams just blur into one. Of course, the playoff defeat against Derby was unquantifiable agony (I’m a probation officer and my shift the next day, hungover and heartbroken while dealing with angry men, many of whom were Leeds fans so extra angry, is a prime contender for my worst ever day at work) but the guard of honour at Pride Park felt like poetic closure. Bielsa is a genius and our squad, who continue to push themselves to their absolute limits, deserve all the plaudits they are getting. They are such a bloody likeable bunch too.
Obviously coronavirus is unprecedented (I’m so sick of that word) and totally shit, but I’m so glad the season resumed and we were given the opportunity to win the league properly, especially given the added poignancy due to Hunter, Cherry and Charlton’s deaths. Since things got back underway, like many, I’ve been watching the matches at home on my own. This has been a bit surreal and, in the case of the Stoke match where my laptop stream was slower than my pal’s and he texted me 3 seconds before every goal, not ideal. When Pablo scored the winner against Swansea, though, it was pure euphoria and I danced around the bedroom before behaving like a chronic alcoholic and hiding the cans of lager I’d been glugging under a table so Louise wouldn’t see them.
I was 17 when we were relegated and I’ve spent so much time thinking about how I would celebrate when we finally got back up. Here’s how it went: I watched Huddersfield’s winner against West Brom on my phone on silent in a dark room while trying to rock our baby to sleep as he vomited on my shoulder. When I got downstairs, with our toddler charging around and shouting, I mooted the idea of me “popping to Elland Road to see what was happening” but Louise’s response was arguably cooler than Carlton Palmer’s in Hong Kong and I had to make do with following the celebrations via Mateusz Klich’s Instagram feed. It’s a shame to have missed out on the party but it doesn’t matter. Right now, all of the rubbish that Leeds fans have been through over the past 16 years doesn’t matter either. The good times are back at Elland Road and it is exciting beyond belief.
